Can Someone Please Explain this to Me About RAM

[Peachesbackwards]

I consider myself fairly computer literate but I'm a bit confused about a particular concept of RAM & I would appreciate someone explaining this to me so I can grasp it. For this thread, assume I have 512 mbs of memory. Let's say hypothetically I only need to do one single application on my computer that involves 50 mbs of memory. Assume that another 50 mbs are in the background running for mandatory XP operations. So basically I have 412 free mbs of memory & am using 50 mbs of my application. If I was to double my memory to 1GB, and still do the same 50 mb function, will it perform faster or not because the extra memory isn't needed to do the function?

What I'm getting at is, if you're only doing applications that don't require much memory, will adding more memory to your computer not make these applications run faster because you originally had enough memory anyway & therefore the only function of adding memory is to do applications you wouldn't have enough memory to do, beforehand?

 

[Cromewell]

Adding more memory only helps if you use it all. It prevents stuff from being paged on the hard drive. Even with 512MB and only using small footprint programs, things might still get paged. If you want to see if you are using the pagefile, set the pagefile size to 0MB and see if windows tells you virtual memory is low or automatically is increasing it. The other thing you could do is start up the performance monitor (start->run perfmon.msc). At the bottom right click->add counters... From the window that pops up pick PageFile from the dropdown and select counter % Usage.